Josh Koscheck Blames Javier Mendez For AKA Departure

Josh Koscheck dropped a bomb the other night after his victory over Mike Pierce at UFC 143.

Following the fight Koscheck revealed that he was leaving the American Kickboxing Academy, the prestigious camp in San Jose where he had trained for nearly eight years. What he didn’t do was explain why he was leaving, but he certainly opened up about it in an interview with MMA Weekly yesterday. Koscheck said there was one simple reason why he left and that reason is lead trainer Javier Mendez. In short, Koscheck had grown sick and tired of Mendez blaming everyone but himself whenever an AKA fighter lost.

“There’s one reason I’m leaving San Jose AKA and that’s because of Javier Mendez,” Koscheck stated. “He’s the only reason I’m leaving that gym. It almost hurts me because I love training with those guys, I love training with (Jon) Fitch, and (Mike) Swick and Cain (Velasquez) and (Daniel) Cormier, and (Justin) Wilcox and all those guys, they are my brothers, and it hurts me to have to make this decision for me because the fact that it’s like splitting up the family.”

“This goes back from quite a bit, and history repeats itself. Whenever you have a guy for example whenever I had the loss against (Thiago) Alves and I took the fight on short notice with him, and after the fight I had a lot of friends come up to me and calling me saying ‘have you read this interview with Javier Mendez?’ and talking about me and my game plan,” Koscheck said.

“So I went online and I read this interview and I started to notice after all my teammates lost, it was the same thing. They didn’t listen to the game plan, that he deferred it away from himself, and he threw us under the bus basically saying that we didn’t listen to him and he tries to make himself look good, so it doesn’t reflect on him us losing.”

“I’ve lost a lot of respect for Javier Mendez as a coach, as a person, because if you go back and listen to the history of the interviews of him after AKA guys have lost, the interviews he does, go back and look at the Cain Velasquez (fight), go back and look at the Josh Koscheck (fight), the other guys on that team, and see if you can find interviews where he refers to ‘Oh I did my job’ to make himself look good and they didn’t do theirs. That’s not a coach.”

Koscheck went on to say that his last few camps have been horrible and he’s basically trained himself due to the rift with Mendez, so he’s decided to stay closer to home in Fresno and train there. He still loves all of his AKA teammates like “brothers” and hopes to bring them in when he needs training partners. And no, he hasn’t changed his stance on fighting Jon Fitch. Kos says would move up in weight or even walk away before he would fight Fitch, even it was for a title shot.